Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
t e n
A true Measure of Violence:
California, 1906-1935
“1906 MARKED THE DAWN OF THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION” proclaims a
website of the US Geological Survey.
1
no event has received more credit
for having jump-started the science of seismology in the United States than
the San Francisco earthquake of 18 April 1906. the investigation is cited
as the most thorough ever undertaken of a seismic disaster. the evidence
collected is hailed as the source of the elastic-rebound theory, the corner-
stone of the explanation given by seismologists today for most earthquakes.
Yet 1906 would hardly have looked like a revolution to anyone who had
followed the european history of seismology since the 1870s. the San
Francisco investigation was, above all, an exercise in what Suess and his
european colleagues called the monographic method, and the conclusions
were essentially an elaboration of his tectonic theory. nor did the earth-
quake shake the confidence of California's boosters.
2
no, the designation of
1906 as a scientific revolution expresses an aspiration rather than a reality.
Since 1755, the earthquake has been the symbol of choice for an intellec-
tual rupture that produces a “modern” discipline. But the foundations of a
scientific discipline are rarely so easily shaken.
3
Well after 1906, indeed into
the 1930s, “modern” seismology relied heavily on the eclectic methods of
nineteenth-century
Erdbebenkunde.
that very continuity disturbed seismolo-
gy's newfound American promoters. the history of seismology in California
from 1906 through the publication of the Richter scale in 1935 is a story of
attempts to distill a “pure” science from one that was deliberately hybrid.
It is also the story of Harry O. Wood, an unlikely hero for this topic.
Wood was an east Coast boy—born in Maine, a graduate of Harvard Col-
lege. He failed to earn a PhD and struggled to find academic work in Cali-
fornia. All his life his colleagues addressed him as “Mr. Wood,” while
he addressed them with academic titles. Wood seems to have brought
